Not Good, but Loud and Fast and Full of Rage
by dragonofeternal
Summary: Sometimes all it takes to break the doldrums is a single song.


Roxas wasn't entirely sure how he'd wound up here. It felt like one moment he'd been indulging-slash-suffering through listening to the dude ringing up his soda at the gas station talk about his band, and the next he'd found himself sitting here watching said band get ready to play. He knew that more had happened in there- He'd grunted to shrug off a lame pickup line, for sure, right before he accidentally agreed that it would be pretty cool to watch this guy's band practice. And once that had happened, well, Roxas hadn't had it in him to crush the guy's spirits. Cue a short ride in a cramped two-door car that direly wished it was a sports car, and jump cut to now, sitting in a stranger's basement.

Roxas scratched absently at the faded sticker plastered on the gear case he was sitting on instead of a proper chair. Even if he wasn't sure he wanted to be here, it was something to do with his night other than sit around eating microwave ramen and channel surfing the five public access channels that weren't complete static at his apartment. Hell, he'd even been promised food when it was all over, which was incentive enough to tough it out.

The guy who'd dragged him all the way out here glanced up from his guitar and flashed Roxas a grin. Roxas answered it with an awkward half smile and a wave. Something in that awkwardness must have made the guy realize something, however, because his eyes widened a little and he made a sweeping gesture across the raised plywood platform that stood in for a proper stage.

"Oh, shit, I should introduce you to the band before we start, right, Roxas?" He raked a hand over his crimson spikes before pointing to one bandmate, then the other. "Over there tuning his shit is Demyx, who has plenty of talent but no balls, and back there on drums is Larxene, who I'm pretty sure I saw punch a kid once, and, of course," the man finished, gesturing to himself, "me, who you already know."

Roxas gave him a doubtful look. "Do I?"

"Ah- Come on!" The man jumped off the makeshift stage and flicked Roxas in the forehead. "It's Axel, got it memorised? Come on, I was even wearing a name tag until we got here!"

"I can't say I was really looking." Roxas shrugged off Axel's teasing and leaned around him to look at Demyx and Larxene. "I'm Roxas."

"Yeah, we got that," Larxene said with a sniff. "I can't believe you're still trying to make that dumb nickname stick, Lea."

Axel turned around and shot Larxene a filthy look. "It's Axel."

"Whatever," Demyx said, finally looking up from his guitar to stop the fight before it could start. "We ready to start the show, or what?"

Axel scowled and stepped back up onto the stage. "You're the one who was holding up the party…" Axel took his spot near the microphone and grinned, striking a pose and winking at Roxas as his fingers danced to position to be ready to play. "Do we wanna start off with Trashcan Fire?"

Demyx shook his head. "Nah, do Barfight."

"Whaaat?" Axel gave Demyx an exaggerated look of anguish. "We always open with Barfight. Let's do Trashcan Fire instead, it's a better opener!"

Larxene spun around a drum stick before wailing on a snare and punctuating it with the high hat. "I'm with Axel, we always do Barfight, and Trashcan Fire's still fresh and not boring."

"Ughhh, fine." Demyx rolled his eyes and turned his attention back to his instrument. With a look of utmost concentration, he picked out a string of sour, discordant notes that grated through Roxas' ears like barbed wire.

Axel leaned in to the microphone, whispering to it like he wanted to take off all its clothes and throw it on the floor for some nasty, dirty sex. "If I have to stay alive much longer, I'm gonna light myself on fire and tell it all goodbye." Before Roxas had time to wince again at the cheesiness of the first line, Axel leaned back away from the mic and all three of them exploded into sound. The force of it hit Roxas like a fucking sledgehammer to the chest, first as just noise too fast and loud to process until it resolved to a song that lit a fucking fire in his chest. The sour high notes from Demyx melded with Axel's furious shredding and Larxene's tireless assault on the drums to make something like a harmony, if harmony outside of music somehow meant the absolute fucking opposite. It was like a fucking anthem to violence and self-loathing and all the weird, dead parts of his emotions that had sat withering in his chest for who knew how long. Roxas couldn't make out any more of the lyrics whenever Axel leaned in to spit them, those rapid-fire gunshot words, into the microphone, but it didn't fucking matter. More than their meaning, they were their sound, just one more instrument in the wave of noise that made Roxas want to get off his ass and fucking break something.

If there was a change from one song to the next, Roxas didn't perceive it, the sounds and noise blending together, bridged occasionally by solos of varying quality- Demyx's the ambitious and artful work of someone who wanted to play slightly better than they could, Axel's an ode to naught but how fast he could force his fingers to strum, and Larxene's sounding like a thundercrash that wanted to get into a brawl behind the Denny's right off the highway- until finally Axel abruptly stopped playing and sat down to guzzle down water. Demyx took the opportunity to finish the set with another solo for himself before grinning at Roxas.

"So, that's our band," Larxene said with a smirk. "We're not actually good, but we're really good at being loud and fast, which is like almost the same thing."

Demyx gave Larxene a wounded look, a hand going to his chest in shock. "Hey! Talentless band members should speak for themselves!"

"Whatever," Axel said, after downing almost the entire water bottle in one gulp. "What did you think, Roxas?"

"It was amazing!" Roxas jumped up off the case he'd been sitting on and looked frantically between the three of them. Larxene rolled her eyes, but Demyx and Axel both greedily drank in the praise. "I just- I don't really know how to describe it, but it… I really felt it, you know? I never really thought about seeing someone play live as different than just listening to it on the radio, but it just felt so different? Like I wanna go start a fight, or listen to more of that, or just-"

"How about joining our band then?" Axel interrupted, holding out a hand. "Seems like you're plenty passionate enough."

Roxas stared at Axel like he'd just grown a second head, then down to his hand like somehow it would have an explanation for the ludicrous invitation. Axel's slightly calloused fingers had no answers about why the fuck he thought Roxas joining the band was a good idea, and so Roxas just laughed, looking back into Axel's bizarrely earnest expression. He really knew how to commit to a joke. "What?"

"Join our band!" Axel repeated, reaching out again. "You've only been listening to me talk about it forever when you see me at work, so why not just join up?"

Roxas had always known that silently enduring other people talking at him would come back to bit him in the ass. He just hadn't quite expected it to happen like this. "You guys already have a drummer, and guitarists, and you can sing-"

"No, no," Axel shook his head. "Demyx can sing. I rock. Got it memorized?" Roxas watched Larxene and Demyx trade a chuckle and a look at Axel's expense behind his back at that. "And besides, we're like sort of down a player! We used to have another guy that did bass, but he quit and so now we're missing some deep notes to really make it sound good."

"Okay, but I don't actually know how to play guitar," Roxas protested, fishing for more reasons to not join.

"Neither does Axel," Larxene countered. "Come on, just join so we can stop listening to Axel whine about Saïx quitting."

"I… But…" Roxas looked from face to face and found no sympathy for his protests. He sighed, looking down at Axel's hand. "Fine. I'll join your band."

"Jeez, you don't have to sound so bummed about it," Axel said with a laugh. "Here, we'll play you another set. That'll get you all fired up to join!"

"Now can we play Barfight?"

"Yeah, sure, sure…." Axel unfolded himself from the floor, pitching his now empty water bottle across the room and missing the trash can by a mile. "One, two, go!"

It wasn't so much that Roxas hated the idea of joining in on the band, he realized as he let the wave of sound wash over him once more. It was more that, after so much of a life of nothing, it felt weird to see himself as part of something. The three on the stage played with such passion that the whole room fell away, until it was just them, and Roxas, and the roar of their instruments, the grey world of gas stations and dead-end jobs impossibly far away. Could he grab that rage? Could he feel that sort of passion? When the music ended, they all split a pizza, and Roxas traded words that were probably answers to questions he'd already spaced out and forgotten. That night he lay in bed, arm draped over his eyes, and failed to sleep as the brilliantly clear memories of band practice replayed in his mind over and over.

Roxas showed up early for the next practice, climbing right up on to the stage to join Demyx and Larxene. "I think we should play Trashcan Fire first. Axel's right- it's a better opener."


End file.
